Exciting stuff on the home front and beyond

A lot is happening right here in Dane County, building on the successes and failures of our timebank and working to integrate the pieces of our local sharing economy and connect with others.

We celebrated our 8th birthday in November with a lovely party and swap meet. Lots of cake!

Madison Hours’ last Board meeting took place – the organization officially dissolves at the end of 2013. But it’s a beginning, not an end. Most of the Hours board members joined our Mutual Aid Network Design Team – and we’re off to a great start, which I’ll report here in a minute.

Progress continues on the Allied Community Coop and our PowerTime II energy project. If all goes well the coop could be our first local Mutual Aid Network. Coop participants have finished making an energy conservation video to share with neighborhood residents and landlords. The first training for our next generation of neighborhood in-home energy consultants is scheduled for January, a week after we premier the video at our PowerTime II kickoff event!

And now we’ve held our first Design Team meeting for Mutual Aid Networks!! We’ve broken into groups to work on legal, social, financial and technical questions. In early 2014 we’ll meet with the fantastic lawyer we’ve retained (with excellent experience in cooperative law and cooperative development) and start this in earnest. It’s all very exciting.
You can read our notes here.

In January we’ll ring in the new with a special Builders Workshop. We’ll resume our standard schedule, the third Thursday of each month. Now we’ll be at our brand new downtown public library! The first edition will have a special addition: a one-hour year-in-review, recapping big moments in Dane County TimeBank, my tour and its implications for our work here, and where we are today. Then we’ll Ring in the New with an overview of local, regional, national and global developments. I’ll send more details when we make them.

Help the MAN out

Testimonials:

The best part of my job as Creative Director of Mutual Aid Networks is reminding people that we can dream bigger and better than we’re used to, that we don’t need to be bound by a scarcity mindset, and working together we can make our big dreams into reality.
- Stephanie Rearick, Madison, WI